I cooked an Ageless Oxygen pack today. 

You know, that little plastic package with the words “DO NOT EAT” plastered across the front that you find in bags of beef jerky? Not the harmless silica kind either, the ones with potentially toxic elemental iron. Yup. I slow-cooked one for five hours. 

My day began like any other. I woke up at the ass-crack of dawn and chugged my cup of coffee while “The Wheels On The Bus” blared incessantly in the background. At exactly 9-am, I raced my daughter to the drop-off daycare service my gym offers twice a week and hit the grocery store.

The goal? Impress my husband with a German-style pot-roast. He had recently confessed to me that he finds it incredibly sexy when I cook for him (something I don’t do all that often), and I was determined to blow him away with another slow-cooked creation. The recipe called for half a pack of thick-cut bacon, but who the hell has time to cook bacon before adding it into a crockpot? Well, me. I totally had the time, I just didn’t want to deal with the extra dishes and was determined to spare myself a few minutes. Work smart, not hard, is my mantra. So in that fated moment, I decided to buy a pre-cooked pack of bacon bits. 

I get home and begin to assemble the pot-roast: Yukon gold potatoes, carrots, pearl onions, sauerkraut, and a 30 dollar, pasture-raised chuck-roast we bought from a local farmer. The final touch? My doomed pack of bacon bits. I dumped in the contents of the package and began moving the bacon bits around with a spoon looking for the oxygen pack, which I couldn’t find. After searching for approximately 30 seconds, which seemed sufficient at the time, I thought to myself “oh that’s weird, I guess there isn’t one in there.” and proceeded to add some broth — foreshadowing at it’s finest.

Fast-forward to 5 hours later. The roast smells fantastic, the kitchen is clean, my workday is complete, and I’ve already picked up my darling daughter from daycare. Who says you can’t do it all? Eat your heart out, June Cleaver! My husband comes home and compliments the aromatic atmosphere encompassing our home. I gleam at him brightly, “How lucky is he to have such a proficient wife?” I think to myself. Starving, I open up the lid to my pot-roast to give it a stir, and then I see it. A white and blue Ageless Oxygen pack, floating on the surface.

What happened next was equal parts denial and defiance. “It can’t be that bad,” I think to myself, fixing my fingers to Google the problem and surely be greeted with a reassuring answer. Wrong. Two hours of Googling, and I still can’t tell you if it’s safe to consume food that has been slow-cooked with an iron-oxide packet. There was no definite answer to be found, just an infuriating mix of “It’s not toxic! But if consumed, please seek emergency medical help.” Um, perdóneme? Pick a plotline, internet!

Needless to say, I decided to chuck the chuck-roast. No meal is worth the risk of internal bleeding, no matter how amazing it smells. I wish I could say it was a hilarious “you live and learn!” type moment, but y’all, I lost it. I shed real tears over this chuck-roast. All morning I had shopped, chopped, rubbed, and simmered this meal with the expectation of feeding my family, and I failed. I know it probably doesn’t seem like a big deal, and in hindsight, it wasn’t, but at the time? I felt like a lemon. 

We, as women, endure so much pressure to do it all and do it perfectly. Society expects us to keep a clean house, have obedient kids, and put a home-cooked meal on the table by 6-pm sharp. But this is reality, not “Leave It To Beaver.”  Sometimes we burn the cookies, raise our voices, or miss an appointment, and that’s okay. You don’t have to be perfect to be worthy of love or be of value to your family. Some days, you kill it and get through the day feeling like superwoman. And other days, you slow-cook an Ageless Oxygen-pack and make your husband eat intermittent-fasting for dinner. That’s just life, and either way, you’re still doing a great job.